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Sunday, September 18, 2005

In a recent BBC Radio poll, Karl Marx was voted the greatest philosopher of all time. Dr. Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute responds by taking a look at Marx and his followers.

Marx wrote many things, including admiring words about capitalism which he regarded as a definite advance on previous economic arrangements. The BBC result, however, underlines a strange blindness about Marx persisting within Western societies.

In one sense, this is nothing new. In the 1930s, intrepid Westerners traveled to the U.S.S.R and returned saying that they had seen the future. Somehow they managed not to see the purges, the collectivization, and the gulags that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions. Communism, it is often said, was a godless system. This is not quite right. Communism was godless insofar as it was based upon an atheistic vision of man. Yet Communism did have its gods. It had its deities to whom anything and anyone could be sacrificed.